The revelation did little to ease the tension. The Arab seemed even more disconcerted when he saw where the professor was pointing. He shouted orders to the two guards, and they came up to Nordhausen, seizing him roughly while the leader edged his way to the cleft Paul had found. The man spoke to the gap in the rock now, his voice slipping through in a hollow echo, carefully controlled, yet laden with emotion.
“Look here,” he said. “We have your friend. If you wish him well you will show yourself.”
The echo rebounded to silence.
The faint sound of water washing over stone was all they could hear, a distant, forlorn resonance in the shadowy cave, bereft of the promise of relief that Nordhausen had first heard in it. The leader set the flashlight down and approached the cleft cautiously. He slipped through and it seemed an interminable lapse before he returned, muttering angry words in Arabic as he came.
“You followed the water?” The man came up to Nordhausen, eyes wide, his face a livid mask of shadow in the subdued light of the cave. “You are certain this was the way you came?”
“Yes, he was just there,” said the professor. “Look, what is so important about all this?”
“You fool!” the man went to strike Robert again, but he held his hand at bay, his lips pressed tight, anger flaring in his eyes. “You saw the water?” He asked the question with an unaccountable urgency.
“Yes, but it didn’t look drinkable, so we probed a bit deeper into the passage and—“
“Not drinkable? What do you mean?” Again, the urgency, as if the man was pulling an answer from the professor that he already knew, but did not wish to hear.
“Why, it had this odd greenish glow about it, and a touch of—“ A sudden thought occurred to Nordhausen. The radiation! Paul had been going on and on about that Oklo reaction the French had discovered in Africa, but now Nordhausen began to suspect something else. Suppose these men were members of some terrorist cell. What if they were secreting away a nuke in this cave? That could account for the low level readings that activated Paul’s dosimeter. But that strange glow in the water, and the eerie milky phosphorescence in the stream just didn’t make sense.
“You say it was green,” the Arab leader seized on the remark and pulled hard. “With such a glow that you could make your way in the dark, yes?”
“Well… yes.”
The man spoke harshly to the guards, and they quickly produced a length of twine and roughly bound Nordhausen’s hands behind his back. When they had finished they ran off, each taking a separate passage as though intent on searching the whole network of caves to be certain Paul was not hiding.
Nordhausen’s assumption piled up in his head and began to finally generate some real anxiety for him. If these were terrorists, then the situation took a very dark turn. “Look,” he tried to reason with the leader now. “We mean no harm here, and we haven’t seen a thing. There’s bad water here. So what’s the harm in that? Hopefully your men will find my friend and we’ll be happily on our way to Akaba and leave you all in peace.”
“Hopefully…” The man took off his pith helmet and revealed a dark stringy mane of hair. “But if your friend went in there, there’s no telling where he will end up. The moon is not yet full!” He gestured to the opening of the cave. “It will not be up for hours yet. The timing was all wrong! Don’t you see?” The man spent his anger letting it dissipate into a sullen resignation, as if some die had been cast and there was nothing to be done. Yet Nordhausen could still not discern what he meant.
“Who are you?” The leader asked the question with newfound suspicion. “How did you find this place? Tell me, before I have my men slit your throat for what you have done here today.”
The second death threat was not lost on Nordhausen. He cleared his throat and swallowed hard, realizing that by arguing he might be tempting fate with this man. But what else was there to say but the truth? “I’ve told you,” he said. “We were trying to remove a fossil from a dig. Now I’ll grant you that we were working the dig without proper permits and all, but that’s hardly a mortal offense. We stumbled in here to escape the heat, and for no other reason, I assure you. As for your green water, I know nothing about it, and I don’t care to know anything about it. We were supposed to be on a ship in the Red Sea by now. That damned helo pilot lost his nerve and dropped our cargo, and us along with it, here in the middle of nowhere. Now, that’s it! That’s all there is to say about it. Then you come along with your ill manners, accusations and death threats. And here I sit.”
The man’s eyes narrowed, and then a glimmer of a smile lit them, his lips sneering out, with little warmth. “In the middle of nowhere,” he repeated the phrase, but he did not mock. His expression transitioned, setting deeper with the same resignation the professor had heard in his voice earlier. “Well it seems you are not the only one marooned here now. I was supposed to go through, at moonrise, but the well is dissipated.”
“The well?” Nordhausen tried to ground himself in the exchange. “You mean to say this was a water cache you were worried about? Surely you would not have missed a liter or two. Besides, we haven’t even had a moment to drink. You were upon us before I could even fetch my canteen.”
The man looked at him, hand on his bearded chin now, considering. The guards returned, somewhat breathless, and shaking their heads in the negative. Words were exchanged in Arabic, and Nordhausen got the gist that Paul had not been found. The leader was decided. He glanced at the professor with a vacant look in his eyes. “It is done,” he said. “Your friend is not here, and if you are certain he was in that chamber then he has jumped through—or perhaps he merely fell through—but in either case the result is the same.”
“What in blazes are you talking about? Are you saying he fell into some chasm there? Have your men found… found his body?” There was real pain on Nordhausen’s face now, and he lashed himself inwardly for dragging Paul into all of this.
“My men found nothing,” said the leader. “Nothing at all. And the water you saw glowing in the dark no longer glows. The well is dissipated. If your friend went through then we are all in a Nexus Point now. Who knows how long it will last, or how deep it will reach.”
Nordhausen just gaped at him, not understanding what the man was saying at first, until he spoke those last few words and they jarred him with unexpected recognition.
“Nexus Point?”
The man shrugged, and smiled, his anger finally resolved. “You don’t have any idea what I am talking about, do you? Well, how do you Americans say it: we are all in the same boat now, yes? May Allah guide us safely home.”
It took Nordhausen a moment to absorb the full implication of what he was hearing. Nexus Point. It was part of Paul’s time theory. Could the man‘s use of the term have been mere coincidence? Now it was Nordhausen’s turn sink a line and tug out the answer to a question he dreaded to ask.
“What do you mean by that,” he ventured. “Nexus Point.”
The man gave him a derisive look. “You would not understand,” he said, and he seemed to speak more to himself than to Nordhausen. “What’s done is done. It will be at least another month now before the well can be used again. By that time the situation may have come to some resolution. As for your friend, that remains to be seen. At the very least it will introduce a variation, here… somewhere… Who can say? The well has been very stable, but the timing was off by at least four hours. The temporal locus may shift.” The man nodded his head, considering, almost oblivious of Nordhausen now. “There is no way to achieve any clarity here. I will just have to wait.” He looked up at Nordhausen as he finished. “ You have no idea what I am talking about, do you?”